Strike up the band

Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof…Hence all art constantly aspires to the condition of music; so too, at its best, does theology.

If you say so (and of course ‘at its best’ covers a multitude of sins – at my best I am a paragon of wit and virtue, but my best is oddly elusive). But that is (I can’t help assuming) because the ‘the’ in ‘theology’ is so flexible, so adaptable, so shape-shifting, so all things to all people, that it makes just as much sense to say that theology at its best aspires to the condition of poetry, or rock climbing, or cookery, or sex, or being drunk. In any case theology at its less than best seems to aspire to the condition of a strange combination of story-telling and scholarship. It makes stuff up but uses scholarly-looking language to talk about the stuff it makes up. If Armstrong wants to think that’s a kind of art form…I’m not going to send her a telegram urging her to stop.

A modern sceptic will find it impossible to accept Steiner’s conclusion that “what lies beyond Man’s word is eloquent of God”. But perhaps that is because we have too limited an idea of God.

Right…because God is neither this nor that, neither here nor there, neither short nor tall, neither immanent nor transcendent, neither animal nor vegetable (I can go on like this all day) – God is not something that can be pinned down by our puny words nor grasped by our tiny little minds – God is not a toaster nor my left foot, neither is God Chekhov nor is it J K Rowling. God is not a lug wrench, nor a rainy afternoon, nor a blue whale with a headache, nor a petunia, nor a song, nor a sneeze – yet God contains elements of all those – and then again –

In other words it is always possible to spin words about God (or to be silent about God and consider that a branch of theology) – but we live in the real world, where people think God is a literal person who makes rules that we have to obey (no condoms – flog that woman for showing some hair at the edge of her hijab – kill all the infidels – no stem cell research for you – don’t do any work on Saturday and that includes flipping a light switch – slaughter that goat by cutting its throat in the approved way and no other). The world would be a much better place (which is not to say it would be perfect – no, the “new” atheists don’t think everything would be perfect if religion vanished) if the Armstrong idea of God were the only idea of God – but that’s not how it is. She seems to be telling us we’re confused about what God really is – but that’s a mug’s game. Nobody knows ‘what God really is’ – whatever anyone says is made up, so it seems futile to try to say one version is right while another is wrong.

The more recent atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris is rather different, because it has focused on the God developed by the fundamentalisms, and all three insist that fundamentalism constitutes the essence and core of all religion.

No they don’t. They insist that the God that makes rules and answers prayers and prefers one set of people to another set of people and hates atheists is the God that most people mean by the word ‘God’ and the one that the rest of us have to deal with. They insist that pretending that real religion is really something much more sophisticated and ethereal and poetic and music-like and loving and compassionate is just delusional. They insist (to the extent that they insist anything) that it is the bossy intrusive punitive kind of religion that causes problems and so it’s no good trying to pretend it out of existence.

Because “God” is infinite, nobody can have the last word.

See – there you go: how does she know God is infinite? How does she know God doesn’t expire in 357,941,826,098 years plus a week? How does she know God isn’t the size of ten universes laid end to end and not one bit bigger? How does she know God isn’t smaller than a bread box? She doesn’t – but she says things as if she does (and putting scare quotes on “God” won’t save her – we can still see that she’s saying things).

But a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred was a constant theme not only in Christianity but in the other major faith traditions until the rise of modernity in the West.

Well if Armstrong can persuage people to go back to that there deliberate and principled reticence about God – I for one will send her a big thank-you letter complete with coupon for a large pizza with 3 toppings for $8.99.

Armstrong: “Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof…”

1. But music, and art in general, does NOT defy logical analysis and empirical proof. If it did, it would, for one thing, be difficult to teach and understand. So this claim doesn’t make sense.

2. But she didn’t write music defies logical analysis; it “confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies…” And then, of course, following past practice, she doesn’t define what this mode of knowledge is.

My personal favorite bit this this: “Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is ‘nothing’ out there; in making these assertions their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence.”

So saying that “god does not exist” does NOT deny “the reality of god”?

They insist that the God that makes rules and answers prayers and prefers one set of people to another set of people and hates atheists is the God that most people mean by the word ‘God’ and the one that the rest of us have to deal with.

Or maybe not even “most”–maybe it’s just “a lot of” people–but Armstrong never deals with that.

She never acknowledges that her stance on god is normative and not just descriptive, and that lots of theists don’t hold with it. She thinks the theists who don’t hold with it can be brushed off as aberrations.

You win The Internet for that one, Jenavir – very perceptive. It’s a strange condition shared by all the “sophisticated” theologians of which I’m aware, this baffling confidence that their airy hand waving is a). correct b). self-evident c). share by everyone. Well, maybe Armstrong doesn’t think it’s shared by everyone – she does, after, spend a lot of time arguing that it should be, so she must know it isn’t.

Why, then, is she so much angrier at the tiny handful of the “new” atheists for their “barbarism” than she is agains the millions (billions?) of adherents who aren’t listening to her?

Keith, I suppose she is trying to link the joy and uplift one can feel via music to the joy and uplift some people feel via religion. I guess we don’t really yet understand why it is we respond so to music, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a special “mode of knowledge”, just as “spiritual” joy and uplift isn’t a “mode of knowledge”. Armstrong seems to be using an appeal to emotions mixed in with the tired old god-of-the-gaps argument (we don’t know therefore it’s because of god), yet lack of understanding is being held up as proof of some kind of greater understanding. Bizarre. I wonder, is that what it means to be apophatic?

The things that strikes me about people who say religion is like the arts is that they rarely seem to accept the apparent corollary that religions are like fandoms. If society viewed the group of follows of a religion in the same way it viewed the group of (say) Marvel Comics fans I don’t think religion could be considered a problem at all

The analogy with music doesn’t work. In one sense music is knowable. An acoustician, a sound engineer, a musician, a musicologist all have material things to say about it. In another sense it is unknowable – transcendent, ineffable, numinous and the other grand adjectives that the anti-atheists love to employ.

So, continuing the analogy, when it comes to God, what are the acousticians, sound engineers, musicians and musicologists who can give the material facts about him? The religious apologists skip over the knowable and make a hyper jump straight to the transcendent.

I think her claim that “Because ‘God’ is infinite, nobody can have the last word” is just about defensible

If we take the quotes as meaning that she’s talking about the word ‘God’ rather than any putative being of that job title, then we can read her as claiming that because postmodern academics can use ‘God’ to mean anything at all, then we’ll never be able to get them to shut up.

Which is very true. Although possibly not what she meant. But who can say?

Her basic flaw (apart from the verbal woolliness) is that she mistakes a particular postmodern niche within theology for religion writ large.

It is simply not true that a principled reticence has characterised Christian or Jewish or Muslim belief systems before the rise of modernity. There were always tendencies in that direction. The whole of the Old Testament (Jewish scriptures) is full of arguments against idolatry, but there is no reticence about speaking about God, even though every attempt may seem idolatrous.

There are indeed conflicting reports about God, and once, indeed, instead of in thunder, God is said to be present in a still small voice. And then in a man hanged on a cross. The divine self-emptying, kenosis.

But in order to hide himself, God has to be known, and so it is no surprise that the God of Jesus is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The hidden God is known, as Weil would say, in the very depths of despair. In fact, she holds that God can only be known that way. But if that had been so, none of us would have heard about it. God would be a distant rumour. So, of course, the discourse about God ducks and dives, but it is not reticent, not ever. The God of John’s gospel, for instance, speaks in a clear voice, and Jesus tells us very clearly whose voice he speaks in, a voice that is shrill and intolerant, and, like the Koran, keeps saying over and over that people have heard the truth, and if they refuse to listen to it it is because they are liars and their fathers were liars and murderers from the beginning.

The wooly Armstrong is a sheep of a different ewe! It didn’t take modernity to produce her, just decisive arguments against any god. Then it’s time to bring forth the woolly argument, the path of unknowing (the apophatic way), which, had it been followed from the start, would have doomed religion to silence. Then we wouldn’t have heard anything more about it, and this discussion would seem very strange.

Armstrong doesn’t deserve this kind of mockery. She’s a well-credentialed opponent of fundamentalism. She should be supported in her efforts, not spitefully cut down. The tone of this whole site seems to be just really nasty.

Jake, it takes more than that to make your case. I don’t know what you mean by ‘well-credentialed’ and in any case that’s just an appeal to authority – people can have lots of credentials and still get things wrong. I agree that Armstrong has good intentions, but she also has a habit of making unsupported claims. She also has a peculiarly high standing among people who don’t know much about her subject; that’s where the mockery comes in.

But you’re right about the tone of this whole site of course – it is notoriously nasty. I’m a nasty person.

I don’t read much nastiness in the above. There’s plenty of disbelief that someone can express herself with such exasperating vagueness on a topic she’s written books about.

There’s also a frustration that while religion is being challenged as never before, Armstrong has ‘left the field’ by declaring her god, and religion as a whole, so ineffable it’s impossible to talk about.

I obviously have a lower threshold for nastiness. There are polite ways of expressing disagreement. Armstrong is unfailingly polite towards those with whom she disagrees… it wouldn’t be hard to reciprocate. I was told this was a wonderful website, and certainly the news archive is a great resource, but I guess I wasn’t made aware of the general tenor of the whole thing. It’s a bit off-putting.

Yes, well said Russell. But it is the dishonesty that goes along with her attempt to salvage something from the wreck of religion that is so very troubling.

If she had said -which is true- that there is an apophatic tradition within Christianity, and that that way has made sense to a few (mainly mystics), who sought Christ in suffering or resignation, say, like Weil or Eckhardt, that would be one thing. But to suggest, as she does, over and over again, that this has all along been the primary understanding of what it means to speak of God, is nothing short of a [misrepresentation – edit], and all the credentials in the world will not serve to exculpate her.

Anyway – Jake – yes, I often do make rude jokes about what I take to be woolly thinking. That’s how it is. Whoever told you this is a wonderful website probably likes that kind of thing; you don’t; so be it. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Her conclusion seems to be something more like that God is just a figment of our imagination and therefore atheists are too literal and therefore we should just go right on saying God is infinite and like music and beyond language and whatever else pops into our heads (as long as it’s not literalist atheism).

Actually I’ve been going through the news archives and articles – I just finished one on Freud – and I can see why people like this site. There’s some really fascinating stuff here.I might have jumped the gun a bit, it’s just that from what I’ve read/heard of Armstrong (and it’s been quite a bit recently) she seems very sincere and decent. But who am I to say where rude jokes are warranted and where they aren’t?… It’ll just take some getting used to. I don’t have any particularly good reason to defend her, so I won’t anymore… though I don’t think she’s intentionally misleading anyone.

This might be a good time to introduce something that I recently reread in “The Impossibility Of God”. Having just checked, it is also hosted on the Secular Web, so I will link to it from there: A Moral Argument for Atheism by Raymond D. Bradley

Preamble for Philosophers

The argument I am about to advance is intended mainly for a non-philosophical audience. So professionally trained philosophers may wonder at the fact that I say little about the God of philosophical tradition and much about the God of pulpit and pew.

For them I offer two brief explanations.

First: there is ample precedent for what I am doing. Socrates, for example, examined the religious beliefs of his contemporaries–especially the belief that we ought to do what the gods command–and showed them to be both ill-founded and conceptually confused. I wish to follow in his footsteps though not to share in his fate. A glass of wine, not of poison, would be my preferred reward.

Thus, like Socrates, I take issue with the God of popular belief, not the God of natural theology. And since God, in the minds of most westerners, is predominantly the God of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, I have little option other than to quote from the Bible freely so as to confront squarely the theistic beliefs that are my target and pre-empt charges of having misunderstood or misquoted my sources.

Second: the fact is that most of the big-name philosophers of religion who publish in academic journals such as Faith and Philosophy are themselves believers in the God of the Bible, not just the God of the philosophers. To do a little name-dropping, I have in mind the likes of William Alston, Peter van Inwagen, and Alvin Plantinga. All of these are, as Plantinga puts it, “people of the Word [who] take Scripture to be a special revelation from God himself”. None is averse to quoting chapter and verse of the Holy Scriptures–the morally palatable ones, anyway–in their publications as well as the pulpit.

William Alston, for example, claims: “a large proportion of the scriptures consists of records of divine-human communications,” and holds that God continues to reveal himself to “sincere Christians” of today in ways ranging from answered prayer to thoughts that just pop into one’s mind. Peter van Inwagen confesses: “I fully accept the teachings of my denomination that ‘the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the revealed Word of God.'” And Alvin Plantinga maintains: “Scripture is inerrant: the Lord makes no mistakes; what he proposes for our belief is what we ought to believe.” These views typify the kind of theism, viz., biblical theism, that I have undertaken to refute.

And this gives me an idea. It would be useful if there was an online record of statements by “sophisticated” philosophers and theologians attesting to the fact that they too largely accept that the bible is inerrant (whatever that means), and that ‘the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the revealed Word of God’, etc, etc.

You’re right about Armstrong – she does mean well. But she also does play fast and loose with the evidence at times – and then I (for one) am kind of allergic to her brand of benevolent but woolly generalization – her confusion of the normative with the descriptive, as Jenavir pointed out. I entirely agree with her that it would be great if all religion were primarily about compassion; I utterly disagree with her that it already is. I think she shouldn’t be woolly about that in a world where so much cruelty is done in the name of religion.

I’m sorry, you can edit out the ‘L’ word if you like, Ophelia, but I stand by it. You can be as sincere and as mellow as you like, but if you tell me that most people throughout the history of Christianity followed the apophatic way, and that belief in God, as a transcendent being, is the effect of modernity, I’ll call you dishonest just the same. At least Eric Reitan, for whom I have slightly more regard, since he is at least honest about this, grants that this is an understanding of religious faith which is not only uncommon, but very hard to understand. I, quite frankly, think it only makes sense – that is, apophatic theology only makes sense – if positive theology is lurking in the background, and I think a modicum of sincerity would show this to be true. It irks me, irk irk, that Ms Armstrong gets off as such a nice lady, and so well-meaning and polite, when she is telling a story that is not only at odds with fundamentalism, but with practically every utterance that emanates from the Vatican and Lambeth Palace, and most pulpits of a Sunday morning. Religious beliefs have pratical effects, and if they were like music, their effects wouldn’t be so damned intrusive in the lives of ordinary people, who are held to ransom, not by wool, but by very definite beliefs definitely and positively held. Jake may not understand this, but Armstrong rides her soft fluffy clouds on the backs of people who are really hurt, and she doesn’t deserve to get off lightly just because she’s nice.

Religion and music are analogous in many ways, but you’d not know it from Karen Armstrong’s article.

People may respond to “music”, but nobody responds to music in general, just like nobody responds to religion in general (no matter how many theologians and faitheists try to argue for the benefits of religion as some sort of vague category, which everyone sees the value of in and of itself).

People have their own individual tastes in music, which will move them beyond words, but they’ll be completely unmoved and will just stare blankly if the wrong music is played. They may even complain loudly and obnoxiously until the bad, bad music is stopped. It’s just noise!

It’s just like how the worst comments about a religion always come from followers of another religion, or a different sect of the same religion. I have a Christian friend who will happily state that Islam and Judaism are OBVIOUSLY completely ridiculous. I agree! There’s just one thing we disagree on, that’s all…

People of a certain disposition also have a tendency to declare their music of choice to be divine and to declare music they dislike to be satanic, purely because they are arrogant enough to think that their personal tastes are cosmically significant. Elevation of your own personal views to the status of cosmic importance, being indicative of the preferences of the all-powerful creator of the universe is not very dissimilar.

There are also people who don’t really like music at all, and they’re not inhuman or immoral because of it, and shouldn’t be denied jobs on those grounds.

Dennett even compares religion to music in Breaking the Spell. He loves music and so he tries to put himself in the position of a religious believer being told that the religion they adore is harmful by imagining how he’d feel if presented with evidence that music was harmful, and being told that he should stop liking it.

If Karen Armstrong had said that, this article would have at least been interesting to me. As it is, I just don’t see how she’s any different to those writers that Lucasfilm pays to write short stories that explain tricky plot holes and inconsistencies in the Star Wars films (like, if Vader built C3P0 when he was a kid, why doesn’t he seem to recognise the droid on Bespin? He did, but he REPRESSED it, see?) How is ANY theologian different to that?

I’ll show up, Russell, by and by! But it’s hard to know what to do with a twit!

If anyone’s interested in how this kind of woolly thinking comes out at the other end, where believers are talking about gay and lesbian people, read this, where the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Durham are taken to task for the very positive beliefs they have about God and about what God wants.

I’m glad that Jake recanted on the nastiness of this site. After all, it’s a soft, gentle, fluffy site. It’s all kittens and sweet peas here.

One thing he said is:-

Armstrong doesn’t deserve this kind of mockery. She’s a well-credentialed opponent of fundamentalism.

Armstrong is not a fundamentalist but the wishiest-washiest of liberal Christians. What audience would take her seriously? Not the fundamentalists, who don’t go in for this apophatic stuff, since an intervening and existing god with powers of heaven and hell at his command is an important part of fundamentalism. Not atheists either, who see she is using her clouds of unknowing to smuggle in a deity. So she can only be aiming at other wishy-washy Christians, to aid and comfort them rather than enlighten them. Or possibly to doubting agnostics who want to thing there is something to all that religion stuff.

I’ve read a fair bit of Armstrong – because the books look really interesting, mainly. But, for instance – I tried to recount to someone the basic argument of ‘The Great Transformation’, the book about the ‘axial sages’… and, well, that there *were* these sages (Jesus, Buddha, etc) and they had something in common, ie, stuff about personal behaviour, morality, etc, rather than just ritual…

But why they arose at roughly the same point in human history, what exactly it was which *caused* them… Was there an argument?